How to Help Customers Understand Your Products and Services

In the business world, there’s a lot of chatter about how companies can attempt to understand their customers and what they want.

However, for many businesses, it’s just as important to help customers understand their products. This is especially true in highly technical or novel niches, where products require further explanation and context.

If you find yourself in one of these industries, it’s important to understand how to explain your products to customers so the marketplace is primed and ready to buy.

4 Tips for Explaining Your Products to Customers

If you’re selling apples at a roadside stand, you don’t have to provide much explanation. The same goes for selling hammers at a hardware store or sofas at a furniture store. But as soon as you venture into other industries — like software, health and wellness, and big tech — things become more complicated.

Here are some helpful tips you can use to assist your customers in better understanding the value you’re offering via your products and services:

1. Be Clear

When a product is complicated or completely new to the market, business owners often make the mistake of only providing a little bit of information. They think they’re doing their customers a favor by sheltering them from the complexities of the product, but all they’re really doing is keeping them in the dark.

The best thing you can do is be clear and comprehensive from the start. (You can always produce spinoff content and explanations later that are simpler.)

Joy Organics is an example of a company that clearly explains its products. The brand offers CBD products, an oft-misunderstood market. Rather than be generic with customers, it chooses to develop robust content that explains all of the details, including the differences in broad spectrum vs. full spectrum CBD oil. By educating its customers, Joy Organics sees higher conversion rates.

2. Use Analogies

If someone doesn’t understand what a product or service does, the best option is to explain it in terms he does understand. We see this in every aspect of our lives.

“It’s why when someone describes a movie we haven’t seen as a ‘roller coaster thrill-ride of emotion,’ we know exactly what to expect,” entrepreneur John Bonini writes. “On the surface, a movie and a roller coaster have nothing in common. One involves sitting quietly in a dark room for 90 minutes, the other involves flying through the air in death-defying manner for 90 seconds.”

How can you use analogies to explain your own products? Think about your target market and your audience’s interests and behaviors. Find analogies that fit into these categories, and use them to connect with your customers.

3. Show and Tell

It’s not enough to explain something via audio or text; you also need to show them. The human brain processes visuals 60,000 times faster than text. It also remembers far more of what’s transmitted visually than it does the information that’s shared via other mediums and formats.

One simple, low-budget way to do this is by using whiteboard animation videos. You can pay someone less than $20 on a site like Fiverr to create one for you.

4. Listen to Your Customers

Finally, make sure you’re actually listening to your customers. Hear what they have to say, and record these insights. When you see the same questions and issues emerge over and over again, this is an indication that you aren’t doing an adequate job of explaining what your business does (or what value it brings to the table). Leverage these insights to clear up your messaging and communicate the right information to your audience.

Get Your Customers on Board

It’s impossible to reach any level of success in business without customers who fully buy into what you’re doing. And if customers don’t understand your products, how can you expect them to engage?

Your goal should be to get on solid footing by formulating a plan for success. There’s no easy way to educate customers, but some of these tricks can make the process as practical and seamless as possible.